2014年12月29日 星期一

The Children of Willow Farm By Enid Blyton, Famous Five series

Enid Mary Blyton was an English children's writer whose books have been among the world's bestsellers since the 1930s, selling more than 600 million copies. Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enid_Blyton_bibliographyThis is a list of 762 books by Enid Blyton (11 August 1897 – 28 November 1968), an English children's writer who also wrote under the pseudonym of Mary Pollock. She was one of the most successful children's storytellers of the 20th century.[1]The Children of Willow Farm, illustrated by Harry Rountree 1942本書原書名和作者原文等，都沒資訊。briton/blyton andy 都找不到

Their adventures fighting smugglers, thieves and evil scientists, fuelled on a diet of potted meat sandwiches and lashings of ginger beer, have captivated children for over 70 years.

Now Enid Blyton's beloved Famous Five series is to be made into a film after UK production company Working Title acquired the theatrical rights to the books.

The production company confirmed it had recently snapped up the rights to the whole library of the children's series, spanning more than 20 books, and intends to launch a live action franchise based on the quaint adventures of Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy the dog.

The deal was sealed with publisher Hodder, a subsidiary of Hachette, which has owned the Blyton estate since March 2012. Working Title's Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan are believed to be producing the series.

The books have previously inspired two television adaptations, the first in the 1970s and the second in the 1990s, as well as a 1957 film of Five on a Treasure Island. More recently, a 2012 German film was made of the books, called Fünf Freunde, based on the book Five on Kirrin Island Again.

Tony Summerfield, who has run the Enid Blyton Society since it was formed in 1995, celebrated the news of the Famous Five characters finally appearing on the big screen, though admitted he had some reservations about the project.

He said: "Obviously I think it's a good thing, it seems to me inevitable this would happen. It has struck me as odd they've done Famous Five films in German and none here.

"My immediate reaction would be, it depends on what book they chose to adapt I suppose. It will be interesting to see what they do, particularly to see what period they set it in. If they are suddenly going to bring it up to date, as the Germans have done where they use computers to help them along the way, I would not be so pleased. They could make a heck of a muck of it if they try and bring it into the 21st century."

Summerfield added: "Hopefully on screen the Famous Five books aren't too quaint for the modern child. I honestly can't see a film company trying to do anything like this without trying to sex it up a bit. But any publicity for Enid Blyton is good publicity, keeping her in the public eye. I marvel at how she has this enduring appeal, despite all the competition that's around. Her books are basically timeless."

Blyton, who died in 1968, is still one of the biggest selling children's authors of all time with global sales of more than 100 million books. It was estimated in 2012 that an Enid Blyton book sells every minute and the enduring popularity of the Famous Five books was re-affirmed in a World Book Day poll this year, which revealed they are still the books most favoured by parents for their children.

Earlier this month, Old Vic Productions also confirmed they had acquired stage rights and were looking to launch a Famous Five musical version. Productions director Bruce Walker said: "We are working very hard on this. We want to stay faithful to what the books represent, but we also recognise that the show must work for a contemporary audience. It's all about getting that balance."

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Why Enid Blyton's greatest creation was herself
A new drama reveals how Enid Blyton, author of The Famous Five and Noddy books, was a ruthless self-promoter, exploiting her own children to further her career.

Bonham Carter plays the title role in Enid, which is being screened by BBC4 on November 16.Photo: BBC

A much-anticipated screen biography of Enid Blyton depicts the dark and often melodramatic truth behind the life of one of the world’s favourite children’s authors. Yet the most tense moment during the making of the film, which stars Helena Bonham Carter as Blyton and will be shown tomorrow on BBC Four, happened behind rather than in front of the cameras.

It came one afternoon when Blyton’s only surviving child, Imogen Smallwood, 74, visited the set. “I was really worried about it – we all were,” admits the producer Lee Morris, who had invited Smallwood to watch a scene featuring Bonham Carter as her mother and Matthew Macfadyen as her father, Blyton’s first husband Hugh Pollock. “It was a tense moment because she was walking into a drawing-room in which two people were playing her mum and dad.”

His fears were soon allayed. “She spoke to Matthew and to Helena, watched them at work, then told us she was reassured,” Morris says. “Not only that, she then spent the afternoon giving us some really useful advice. For instance, she changed one of the lines in which a maid addressed her mother as Mrs Blyton. She told us that Enid was always referred to as Mrs Pollock, a small detail, but something that really added to the authenticity.”

Smallwood’s relationship with her mother was complex and fraught, and she was aware of her flaws. Yet Enid is an unflinchingly honest biopic of the woman behind Noddy and The Famous Five. It depicts Blyton as a woman who presented her public and her family with different faces.

Blyton, who died aged 71 in 1968 and has sold 600 million books, was a trailblazer. After training as a teacher, she got her first break thanks to Pollock, who worked at the London publishers George Newnes and helped her publish her first stories in 1924.

But it was her own ruthless business acumen that helped her become the most popular children’s author of the era.

In particular, she had an awareness of marketing, publicity and branding that was far ahead of its time. As her fame grew during the 1940s and 1950s, she launched a magazine, Sunny Stories, aimed at her young readers, or ‘‘friends’’ as she called them. She even enlisted their help in naming Green Hedges, the Buckinghamshire country pile that her success brought her. She also oversaw the design of her books, insisting on her distinctive signature being placed on every cover.

In many ways she paved the path for the literary stars of today, from Jacqueline Wilson to JK Rowling. “She was unbelievably modern. She was a complete workaholic, an achievement junkie and

an extremely canny businesswomen,” explains Bonham Carter. “She knew how to brand herself, right down to the famous signature.”

“She was incredibly business-efficient,” adds the director of Enid, James Hawes. “If she wanted to get a point across or do a deal, there was an icy authority about her.”

The drama reveals how Enid exploited even her own family to bolster the Blyton brand. Her two daughters from her marriage to Pollock, Gillian and Imogen, were routinely wheeled out for publicity purposes as Blyton portrayed herself as a devoted mother. But when the photographers left, the reality was different.

After her mother’s death, Imogen wrote a scathing autobiography, A Childhood at Green Hedges. “My mother was arrogant, insecure and without a trace of maternal instinct. Her approach to life was childlike, and she could be spiteful, like a teenager,” she recalled.

One of the most telling scenes in the film features a tea party that Blyton has organised for a group of her young fans. While the writer makes a fuss of the visitors, her own children are watching from the house where they are locked away from view.

“She was dedicated to her fans, she did her best to write back to all of them. Her relationship with her children, on the other hand, was quite distant. Her fans were her real family,” says Morris.

She was equally hard-hearted towards her husband. When her 15-year-long marriage to Pollock ended because of his depression and alcoholism, Enid’s married lover Kenneth Darrell Waters (played by Denis Lawson in the film) was seamlessly moved into the Blyton home. According to Lee Morris, Blyton was aware of the damage the revelation of her infidelity would do to her image, so she agreed a deal with Pollock that if he admitted to adultery, she would grant him access to his daughters after their divorce.

“It would have caused a huge scandal. Today, it would have been uncovered, but it was different then,” says Morris. “She did the deal with her first husband, but then made it very hard for him to see his daughters.”

The drama recreates a moment during this period that sums up Blyton’s cynical and manipulative methods. “There’s an interesting piece of newsreel in which the family is playing tiddlywinks, and Kenneth is just referred to as ‘father’. This is all part of her reinvention. She was aware of the importance of maintaining brand integrity,” says Hawes.

Hawes, Morris and Bonham Carter are all clear on the psychology that lay behind this behaviour. “She was totally emotionally immature. She’s a therapist’s dream,” Bonham Carter says.

The daughter of a successful cutlery salesman, Blyton lived a solid middle-class existence, first in East Dulwich, then in Beckenham, south-east London. But her world was turned upside down when her adored – and adoring – father Thomas Carey Blyton left home when she was 12. “Life up to then was delicious and fantastic,” Bonham Carter explains. “Her dad was around and she was the centre of his life. She felt secure and safe. Then everything was thrown up in the air. This bomb went off in her life and she couldn’t cope.”

At the same time she suffered a gynaecological condition in which her womb stopped growing. Only hormone treatment later in life allowed her to have children. “Her success, and what was wrong with her life, seem to come from exactly the same place,” says James Hawes. “This is armchair psychology, but she did in some way come to an emotional halt at that point and some part of her did stay forever young.”

As a result, she created the worlds of the Famous Five and Secret Seven books, an idyllic place where the sun always shone, children rode their bikes through the Sylvan glades of the English countryside, ham sandwiches were plentiful and, of course, there was always lashings of ginger beer for tea.

“She retreated to a place where life was lovely and carried on creating that world,” agrees Bonham Carter. “She didn’t want to deal with anything that interrupted it. In her personal life she was cruel by accident because that’s what she needed to keep herself afloat. Hilariously, and almost insanely, she reinvented facts that she didn’t like. She just wanted to carry on creating this fantastic world that, actually, millions of others wanted to escape to because it was so convincing.”

Blyton’s genius was to understand something about the childhood imagination that has been replicated by children’s writers ever since. “Our childhood imaginations haven’t changed that much. We still want that little bit of escapism, we still want, as children, to be free of grown-ups. We want our world of fantasy and imagination that has deflectors against the real world. And she was able to give them that,” says Hawes.

“Even now, kids like to go back to the same characters and the same friends in their books and to go off on different adventures. What she was doing was allowing her readers to grow up with her books. It’s not completely dissimilar to what JK Rowling has done with Harry Potter, in allowing her stories to get slightly older as the readership grows up with the characters.”

Hawes and Bonham Carter are equally clear about why Blyton is enjoying a renaissance among young readers. Sales of her books are on the rise and she was named Britain’s best-loved author in a poll last month.

“The things she was criticised for, like simplicity and repetitiveness, that’s the appeal,” says Bonham Carter. “Reading Noddy to my son Billy I see that he loves it because it’s not complicated and it gets to the point. She had an instinct for simple story types. She said children want familiarity, they want reassurance. They want to feel they are safe and they want to know where they are. And I think that’s right.”

Bonham Carter believes Blyton understood that because she was essentially a child herself. “Enid said that she thought as a child and wrote as a child. She was a forever child. I had a quote on the front of my script which

I think was the key to playing her. It says growing old is compulsory, but growing up is optional. That was her.”